I have 3 daughters. The oldest just turned 13, my twins are going to be 10 in February. They all liked to play games and outdoors but all 3 take dance classes and are in girl scouts and do a lot of church events. I had tried to get them interested in UT Football several times and every time they all basically told me they weren't interested after a few minutes. It probably didn't help that we were going through the holy trifecta of hell (Dooley, the Trumpet Diddler, and Coach Gomer). So, I typically sit at my home office computer and watch the game on one screen, another game on the second screen, and keep up with Chat on the 3rd monitor. Since I can't just curse as much as I'd like outwardly I lash out on here as therapy. My kids ears don't need to hear what's in my head when it comes to UT football. But this weekend was different. The 13 year old come into my office and asked what channel Tennessee was on. I was beside myself and said do you mean the football game? She said yes I want to watch it. Would you watch it with me? Of course I will! The twins and wife decided right before halftime they were interested and come into the living room and started watching also. All 3 girls were asking questions and thought I was the smartest person on the planet (as opposed to me being a bumbling idiot the rest of the time) for the duration of the game because I could explain what was happening and what I thought would happen. We aren't going to make a Hallmark movie out of this or anything but after it was all said and done all 3 girls asked me to buy them a UT football shirt that they can wear on our trip to the beach. We will be driving north to south through almost the entire state of Bama heading to Panama City Beach the day of the Bama game. I don't know how long this will last but I never really realized how much it meant to have the kids want to watch the Tennessee game with me. Hell if nothing else Heupel has done one thing that I can always thank him for. Having a team that's fun enough to watch that my kids actually took interest in it. And the 13 year old has already said she wants me to watch the LSU game with her. I'll take this as a win. Seeing the game through the kids eyes softens things up a little bit. Although when Florida recovered that onside kick Saturday my wife looked at me and said IF they score just go outside and scream don't break anything in here. I would call my kids bandwagon fans but they haven't ever been on any other team so I guess they are just bandwagon UT fans now as long as the team is fun to watch. Hopefully they'll be fun for the next few years at least and they'll want to watch more games and maybe even go to a game. Never thought this would happen after years of trying to get them involved.
My six year-old asked me to write down the score of the Akron game after she went to bed. She got up and saw it the next day and said “I can’t believe Tennessee scored more than last time! And the other team didn’t even score as much as Ball State!” She’s six so it probably has much less chance of sticking than in your case, but still cool.
Indy will explain to her that this isn't really meaningful and that really the Akron game was troubling because the defense gave up more points than Michigan state's did, so she needs to hit the "breaks" on her enthusiasm.
My oldest won’t watch because he doesn’t want to jinx Middle could give a shit except he worked during the game and nobody coming into Verizon to buy a new phone at that time. 16 yr old was with me on the field in his Bru jersey for the first big win he’s seen in person in his life. This was after I pulled him away from a Chi O tailgate hoping he didn’t get up out of his chair with a full one.
Friday night my 10 year old said Florida would win so I threw her outside for about 10 minutes. (I'm not kidding.) My son got so amped watching it my mom had to get him to calm down. He was quite pissed I took his mother instead of him to the game.
I took my wife to the game on Saturday and, as most here know, she's not from this country and doesn't understand much about football. I was a little concerned about her getting bored and wanting to leave early, but I told her many times about the craziness of a true big game at Neyland she needed to experience. She turned out to be interested and followed fairly well, cheering and pointing out things which newcomers might find funny or unusual where a seasoned fan would not. Like, she thought it was hilarious a real dog ran out of the T on to the field. She stated she was finally understanding parts of it and saw why I enjoyed it. However, she did pointedly lament the number of stoppages in the game. "Ugh, why are they stopping again!?", which she notably blamed on Florida as they called timeouts at the end of the game and I let her burgeoning hatred of "the Alligators" stand without correcting her for the reasons of stoppage. It was a fun time. I'm not sure if she'll go to Neyland again, though she does like basketball and has attended multiple UT-Vandy games in Memorial with me.
People who aren’t from America are always bewildered, amused and amazed by our love affair with collegiate athletics. College sports is truly a unique American cultural phenomenon that is hard to explain to those who weren’t born into it. Only country in the world who cares about non professional sports on a large scale This video is old as hell now, but I always found this clip of Brit Stephen Fry describing his experience at the Iron Bowl as if it’s a nature documentary to be interesting
@DownNDirty Glad you've got some household interest at a time where we are headed the right direction. Winning is more enjoyable when you have people in the house enjoying it with you. And [uck fay] the rest of you. Except Tar Volon. I agree with pretty much everything I've seen him post since the game.
It warms my orange geezer soul to see the young-uns getting interested in the Vols. I started taking our grandkids to Neyland to 1 game/year when they reached 4-5. The youngest is now 13, the oldest is 21. At 4-5, the boys were able to pee in the trough without standing on my feet and the girls were old enuff to go in with one of the nice ladies in our section if the wife or their mothers weren't there. Keep at boys. Go Vols!
Always beautiful seeing the older ones passing the torch to next generation. Nothing like being a young kid and seeing that sea of orange in person for the first time. This University and football program has been damn important culturally within my family for the last 100 years. Hopefully 100 years from now my future kin will still love and appreciate the beautiful glow of Tennessee orange.
My 10 year old wears a coon skin hat most Saturdays, my 8 year old will consistently point out Florida or Alabama sucks and my daughter turns into a screaming maniac when Tennessee makes a big play
My boy is 9, plays football, but is too fidgety to sit down and watch a game on tv. So I just lied to him the first 8 years and told him we won every week. He thinks we’re defending our 8th consecutive national championship and riding a 116 game winning streak right now. Follow me for more dad hacks and parenting pro tips.
That's funny, I took the lady friend to the UF game for her first UT game and experienced a lot of the same things (Edit: originally, I forgot to mention that she's South American, too, hence why your story resonated) -- namely, I forewarned her about the amount of people, tailgating, size of the stadium, crowd noise, etc., and told me she thought I was exaggerating. She enjoyed tailgating, seeing the sea of people outside the stadium for the Vol Walk/Band March and the general pregame atmosphere, but after walking through the tunnel to our seats, seeing the field, and the sheer amount of people crammed into the place, she was legitimately in awe for a few seconds -- watching her have her, "oh shit, this place is massive" moment brought me a big grin and an even bigger "I told you so". She'd maybe watched a total of 5 minutes of games with me over the past couple years, so I'd kind of worried she'd get bored of a 4 hour game in person, but she was entertained and invested the entire time -- though she said she was legitimately scared in the last 30 seconds of the game where UF was driving with the potential to win because she was convinced the half-drunken crowd around us was going to start rioting if we lost. And she might not have been wrong. Anyway, she enjoyed it enough to where she asked about going back to the Bama game, so it went about as well as one could've drawn up.
